Quantum Machines Raises $17.5 Million in Venture Capital Funding

Israel’s Quantum Machines said it has raised $17.5 million in early stage funding, according to Reuters.

Entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz and Harel Insurance investments (HARL.TA) with the participation of previous backers TLV Partners and Battery Ventures led the funding round for quantum computer hardware and software developer.

Quantum Machines, which was founded in 2018, the company has nearly 30 employees – more than half of them physicists,  launched its Quantum Orchestration Platform earlier this year.The platform gives researchers and development teams tools to run complex quantum algorithms and experiments. The company was profiled here in The Quantum Daily last year.

Venture Beat reports that Quantum Machines cofounder Itamar Sivan believes the company’s platform is positioned to play a key role in making quantum computing more practical and accessible in the coming years.

“We’re now transitioning from experimental physics to an actual, useful computer,” Sivan told Venture Beat. “We anticipate in a couple of years, maybe two or three years from now, we’re going to see useful quantum computers.”

Sivan said that additional layers are needed to allow developers to write algorithms to use that power.

“We build systems that operate quantum processors and allow them to realize their potential,” Sivan said. “The orchestration platform, which is what we have introduced a few months back, is a hardware and software system platform that allows you to code very easily, very complex algorithms, and it will then orchestrate these algorithms on the quantum processor.”

Because quantum processors can throw off a complex array of signals that are difficult to manage, Quantum Machines has created its own dedicated processor to manage or “orchestrate” the pulses flowing in and out of the quantum processor.

Quantum Machines has developed software to write algorithms in the company’s QUA programming language.

“It gives you the possibility to express extremely complex algorithms with extreme precision,” Sivan said. “It’s a fairly low level language and what we call ‘quantum native.’ It’s very expressive so you can do much more complex things.”

The company has already sold the system to several large corporations, government labs and academic institutions.

“The race to commercial quantum computers is one of the most exciting technological challenges of our generation,” said Willenz, who in December sold his company Habana Labs to Intel Corp for $2 billion. Willenz also sold companies to Marvell, Amazon and Cisco.